It only happens to the best of them.  If you supersized your order at any restaurant, you are certain to gain more calories for your dollars. If you survived a supersized distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, you are sure to be celebrated for your cyber security incident response plan. On Wednesday, February 28, 2018, GitHub.com endured a supersized DDoS cyberattack that lasted only ten minutes. The size of the tremor (wrong monstrosity) or the size of the cyberattack surpassed 1.2 terabit per second (Tb/s).  This is rather newsworthy as the City of Atlanta’s network has been paralyzed by a ransomware attack that has lasted more than 10 days.  City of Atlanta’s ransomware was detected at 5:40AM on Thursday, March 22, 2018.   Newman reports that after intermittent outages, GitHub called Akamai Prolexic, which used an intermediary (DDoS appliance?) to route incoming and outgoing traffic. Perhaps the intermediaries were scattered throughout GitHub’s network? The traffic was sent to its scrubbing centers.  After eight minutes, the threat actors grew weary and desisted. What are scrubbing centers? Scrubbing centers are alternative methods against DDoS with competing objectives, whereby an organization has to choose between “just in time protection,” “on demand protection,” or “always-on protection.”  The unknown intermediary would have filtered- according to the White Paper-all traffic from the Internet which explains fatigued threat actors. Although this method is advantageous for immediate mitigation devices, there are bandwidth, latency and resource utilization limitations. The sources of the DDoS attack were memcached servers that consisted of several thousand autonomous endpoints according to Skottler. When multiple memcached servers are integrated with User Datagram Protocol (UDP) enabled, this type of cyberattack also is referred to an amplification attack.  An advantage of using a memcached server is less overhead in establishing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection.  Although GitHub.com thwarted the largest DDoS attack, there have been other notable DDoS attacks. Two of the five memorable DDoS attacks in 2017 were Electroneum- the mobile-based cryptocurrency- and Melbourne IT according to Bisson.  Also, in 2016, DDoS attacks were common against Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructures.

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